Norman de Greve is chief marketing officer of CVS Health. The decision his company is best known for, leaving tobacco, is usually told as a moral one. His account of it is a business case that had to be made before anyone could act on the principle.
What made the confidence possible was a second business most people do not know CVS has. The bet was that giving up cigarette sales would win larger corporate health contracts, and he says that is what happened.
Key findings
- De Greve is careful not to claim the decision was the sole cause of anything. His formulation is that in a serious negotiation it was the thing that tipped the outcome.
- He is blunt that the risk was personal as well as financial. The loss was certain and the recovery was a hypothesis.
- The decision unlocked the acquisition that changed the company. He argues an insurer could not have been bought by a business still profiting from the leading cause of preventable death.
- He remains astonished that no other national retailer claiming to be about health has followed, and says so directly.
- His argument for purpose is aimed at employees rather than at customers. People are more connected to their employer than to their local community, and an organization visibly committed to something drives engagement, which drives innovation.
None of it came from the top, and none of it came from marketing
The evidence de Greve offers for the engagement argument is a list of decisions taken by people in the middle of the company after the tobacco decision made the direction unmistakable.
A merchant removed sunscreens below a certain protection factor from her shelves because they do not work, giving up the revenue, and was rewarded for it. The company was the first national retailer to remove artificial trans fats from the food it sells.
On beauty imagery, the move was not a campaign but a rule applied to every supplier: disclose whether an image has been altered. De Greve is careful to distinguish it from the famous predecessor. Because the requirement applies to everyone selling into the stores, no brand is disadvantaged by complying.
The one he tells with most feeling came from the pharmacy side, on an emergency allergy injector priced at a level that forced a genuine choice on a parent. Pharmacy staff went to a generic manufacturer, committed volume, and produced an equivalent that cost ten dollars with a coupon.
His point in listing them is the same in each case. Nobody was told to do these things, and the marketing department did not invent them.
Purpose is not a mission
De Greve draws a distinction he thinks gets lost. A mission is what the company wants to achieve, and he considers most of them uninspiring to employees and less inspiring still to customers.
A purpose is about who you help, and the emotional weight sits there rather than in the ambition. He compares it to the finding that people who express gratitude carry less stress.
The line he ends on is the sharpest in the conversation, and it is aimed at every company running purpose out of a communications budget.
He also declines to oversell the research. Purpose moves purchase only when everything else is equal, and he says that is rarely the case.
The third stage, and why the marketer arrives speaking a foreign language
De Greve’s model of a company has three stages. In the first, an unmet need is met, which he describes as an essentially entrepreneurial and marketing act. In the second, the company sells more to the relationships it has, which produces product innovation.
The third stage is operational efficiency, and most large companies live there. He is explicit that this is valuable rather than a failure, but the language of the company becomes analytic and financial and the focus becomes incremental.
That is why a creative proposal lands badly. It is not wrong. It is simply at odds with every other conversation in the building.
His remedy is order of operations rather than translation. Speak the company’s language first, help with the objectives it is already pursuing, deliver, and only then introduce the other kind of proposal.
He also refuses the premise of the complaint that marketing has lost relevance.
What the state of the role actually is
Asked from his industry board seats to characterise the average chief marketing officer’s position, de Greve declines to soften it.
He does not think this reflects the people. He thinks it reflects where their companies are in the cycle and how the function presents itself.
Purpose as a way of moving ten thousand places at once
De Greve’s most practical argument for purpose is about distributed control. With ten thousand locations and events moving faster than instructions can travel, nobody can tell everyone how to behave.
What a purpose supplies instead is a set of principles that produce coherent behavior without instruction, and he reaches, with some hesitation, for a comparison with military command structures reorganising to face distributed opponents.
Two habits taken from the crisis
The first is levelling the communication. CVS invited two levels below the executive team onto the daily calls, and the effect he reports is not only that people below heard more. It is that the senior team did.
The interviewer supplies the corroborating measurement from IRG’s own work with LinkedIn: in over-performing organizations, senior leaders were five times more connected to junior colleagues.
The second habit is focus. De Greve’s complaint about normal conditions is that reasonable people pursue reasonable projects until attention is in fragments.
The concrete case is testing, which the company leaned into rather than spreading itself, and which he reports as a large share of retail testing in the country.
Building the talent because there is nowhere to hire it
De Greve thinks the profession has a recruitment problem it caused itself. It is not attracting the right people because of how it describes what it is.
His counter-pitch, aimed at people heading into consulting, is that marketing offers the frameworks and the execution, and he adds that leading with fun is what has failed.
Having concluded there is nowhere to recruit the full skill set consistently, CVS decided to build its own marketing institute, and he expects it to be a decade of work.
You can optimize yourself out of business
On the swing to measurement, de Greve’s objection is not to analytics but to what happens when nothing balances them. Repeatedly doing more of the highest-return thing has an end state, and he describes it.
His diagnosis of why it went too far is about status rather than method. The function was so anxious to prove it was rigorous that the proof became the point.
Calm confidence
Asked for one thing to pass on, de Greve picks something he admits sounds dry: build confidence, in your team and in your business partners, because it is what makes everything else possible.
Pressed on whether it starts with himself, he draws the line carefully between confidence and its counterfeit.
The leadership habit he credits is not from business at all. His wife teaches young children, and the rule he took from her is to praise the behavior you want rather than name the behavior you do not.
Scope and limitations
This is one executive’s account of his own company’s history, recorded in autumn 2020. The revenue figure, the testing share and the causal link between leaving tobacco and winning corporate contracts are his statements rather than independent findings, and he qualifies the last of them himself.
Source
This page summarises HGS #9: Norman de Greve (CMO, CVS Health) on his marketeer career; from personal to brand purpose, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2022-02-16.